28 October, 2015

Cold War 2.0: US launches South China Sea military provocation against China

The United States has launched a
reckless military provocation against China by sending a naval vessel
within the 12-nautical mile limit surrounding islands claimed by
China in the South China Sea.

Early today [27/10], local time,
the guided missile destroyer USS Lassen entered the exclusion zone
around the Chinese-occupied and claimed Subi and Mischief reefs in
the Spratly archipelago. China has reclaimed land from the sea and
constructed facilities on the reefs. The USS Lassen was accompanied
by a P-8A surveillance plane and a P-3 surveillance aircraft.
According to US sources, China was not informed and no incident
occurred.

The brazen and aggressive
character of the operation is underscored by the fact that it has
been undertaken in the total absence of military activity against the
US by China. Rather, it assumes the form of a pre-emptive strike
aimed at humiliating the Chinese regime and placing it in a situation
where it either confronts the US navy or bows down to Washington’s
repudiation of China’s decades-old territorial claims in the
strategic South China Sea. Not coincidentally, the operation was
announced just as a major meeting of the ruling Chinese Communist
Party central committee was convening to consider economic policy
over the next five years.

According to an unnamed US defense
department official, who provided a briefing on the operation, the
deployment of the USS Lassen is not a one-off, but the start of a
series of provocations.

The US actions vastly raise the
threat of a military clash with China and the danger of a war between
nuclear-armed states that would draw in every country in the region
and beyond. A senior Chinese naval officer declared earlier this
month that any forces violating Chinese sovereignty would be met with
a “head on blow.” On October 9, the Chinese foreign ministry
warned that China would “never allow any country to violate China’s
territorial waters and airspace in the Spratly Islands in the name of
protecting freedom of navigation and overflight.”